Cosmic Quote #10

“Do you realize that if it wasn’t for Edison we’d all be watching TV by candlelight?”–Al Boliska

Image Credit: Doug Savage. Click for link.

If Sandy wasn’t enough, no sooner did our power come back then, in succession over the next few days, one of my two office desktop PCs died, followed by the monitor for the other one, followed by my cable modem. Then the icing on the cake was my business phone land line going dead. If it wasn’t for broken technology, I’d have no technology at all. At the rate this is going, I will soon be sending emails via pony express.

Comments

Gotta love Mercury Retrograde – all this month! My PC went bonkers yesterday (never happened before) I looked on the bright side – I got to relearn how to use pen and paper – and a Stamp! LOL Love the cartoon as a former IT project manager….

Aha. The enemy, LOL. I was marketing services manager and had to coordinate my own department with sales and IT on an intranet project. I still have nightmares about it. Why I keep torturing myself by reading Dilbert, I have no idea. 🙂

I feel your pain 😉 Therefore I need to add one of my favorite quotes from The Cluetrain Manifesto on corp. intranets: But dictatorial directives – “All Web pages must be formally approved by the Department of Business Prevention” — throw cold water onto all that magic-mushroom enthusiasm.

Wow. I can’t believe Scott Adams didn’t write that; it could have come straight out of the mouth of Mordac the Preventer of Information Services. And here is an update: my internet problem was caused by a defective cable modem that was so old it could be displayed as an ancient artifact in the Smithsonian. The business land line is still out, even after the AT&T serviceman showed up this morning. He was clueless as to why it was down and had to refer it to another department. I have a dreaded feeling that Mordac will get involved. 😦

Good luck with you modem replacement! I am looking forward to more posts by you on kafkaesque experiences. Service departments of major providers are often more like Mordac squared or cubed (*) despite or because of their ostensible dear-most-valued-customer-we-care-so-much attitude.
(*) This should be probably analyzed in terms of The Sackler Laws.

The replacement modem is working fine as you can see by the speed of my responses. There is definitely an Equation of Everyday Life lurking somewhere in all of this. Before I do that, though, I need to stop procrastinating and complete the promised second part of Millennium Conjecture #3. The serious stuff always seems harder to spit out than the satire.

Don’t underestimate the cost, either. But batteries or a generator for a power failure is one thing; these items were all broken. B-R-O-K-E-N. Last time I checked, a battery is not much use to remedy that. Anyway, the way things are going that would probably break, too. 😛